Email a friend

To

From

Thank you

Sorry

Tech unemployment is still murderously high, so it's no surprise that it took a nearly 10 months to hand out 65,000 H-1B petitions for 2011. That's the longest wait to fill the quota in about seven years, but that hasn't stopped anti-employee forces from hatching a scheme to allow an additional 55,000 graduates to stay in the country and push even more U.S. workers out the door.

What's more, a new survey of CFOs by accounting and consulting firm BDO USA points to a renewed wave of mergers and acquisitions in the software industry, a trend that always results in heavy job losses as workforces and information systems are consolidated.

I don't blame the foreign-born techies and graduate students who want to work here; after all, everyone dreams of a better life for themselves and their families. But the corporados and right-wing politicians behind the move to open the doors even wider aren't interested in the welfare of the deserving foreign-born.

Ultimately, they want to drive down everyone's pay and make the workforce even more docile and fearful than it is today. Indeed, it's well-known that many H-1B holders wind up working for wages that are significantly lower than those paid to American workers.

H-1B is riddled with flawsAt a time when some politicians want to build a Berlin-style wall across the border with Mexico, you'd think that at the very least, there would be a reasonably accurate system to account for the hundreds of thousands of H-1B visa holders still in the United States. Think again.

According to a recent report by the independent Government Accountability Office, the government doesn't know how many H-1B workers are in the country or how many stay after their visas expire. That's astonishing.

I certainly don't think those H-1B holders are here to harm anyone, but if the feds can't track the number of visas issued, there's a huge opportunity for abuse. "We are deeply troubled that DHS [Dept. of Homeland Security] has no idea how many H-1B visa holders are working in the United States at a time when millions of Americans are unemployed," said senators Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) in a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano.